Down and dirty (foss) video compression software?

brent

Have a 50MB .m4v video file, with sound.
I am emailing only here, as an attachment (no drives), and need this compressed to roughly 20MB so its within conventional email account parameters. Hell 10MB might be better.

I'm flailing around in Handbrake at the moment but I will play a little more...
...more direct: if this was your scenario what would you do?
thank you.

edit: with all the Handbrake 'save as' options I can't do better than 36MB compression

Harvey

I guess my question would be why attach it? You could just share it on google drive, via a unlisted youtube link etc.

brent

Harvey a colleague at work I don't know well but have known for a while, and I, had a conversation where we both loved a certain musical artist and this person was stoked I had some rare footage. So I said I'd get it to him....it's not professional to use work gmail drive for these...plus I would NEVER invite people into my own personal drive because I'm not built like that...this is a one-off thing so I don't want to create a dropbox account...and I don't have a youtube account either plus I would never lend a thumb drive out I'd never see it again🙂.

brent

Harvey I guess my question would be why attach it? You could just share it on google drive, via a unlisted youtube link etc

MODS: I was unable to set Harvey's response as solved/or set as Best Response^^. Please mark Solved, thank you.

Against my better judgment I just shared the DVD clip via MS OneDrive on a work account. I don't use google or MS in my personal life. It was a fragment of a German chamber orchestra doing an obscure rock piece in 2004, nothing piratey or weird. But there's a reason (internet hygiene) I keep my personal and professional life separate. I was very disappointed to have to cross that line.

---nothing I did would get that 50% reduction rate anyway although I will say I did spend about 90 minutes total trying as much as I could. Thank you everyone who responded.

Harvey

Well compressing a video in a archive like .tar, .rar, .7z etc will make no meaningful change to the file size. Re-encoding the video to something still worth watching is unlikely to get you to the size you are after which is over a 50%+ reduction.

Spanned zip / rar would work but it would require multiple emails to send the pieces and is just overly complicated for the average person to deal with.

All I can say is google drive allows you to share selected content, to anyone who has the link for it thus no inviting is required. Other than that I have no good answer for your scenario as you've ruled it all out.

brent

Harvey Harvey the quality of going from 50 to 31MB--the lowest I could muster---rendered truly horrid results so it's not even worth a 7zip and an email. The degradation was like watching sandpaper.. I thought there was some magical software animal that could do something this simple (to me, that is).

My reasoning is I've used, nemo fileroller and a common cli program to change 10MB jpegs into 2MB pngs so I could post pictures to this forum....with NO change in quality really. I thought that would exist with video/audio files as well.

@Sebastian ---thank you for that idea, too. I like it.

Sebastian

Lately, I had the same scenario. I had a mp4 video made with my phone that I needed to send per email. And it was way to big. Was searching for a quick and easy way to shrink it in size on linux. Turned out to be not that easy and I was out of patience. So I just send me the video to myself via WhatsApp. WhatsApp shrinks videos a lot by sharing them. And then I send that file per mail. That was the best I could do 🙈 Quick and dirty life hack

Sebastian

For sharing your video you could also use the wetransfer service.
That is a webpage to which you can upload the File you want to share. You have to provide your email adress and the one of the person you wanna share the file with. This person then receives an email from wetransfer containing a link to download the file.
The link expires within 7 days or so.

xjdwc

Does this option interest you?
Internxt Send

brent

xjdwc thats pretty badass but I don't need all the encryption and privacy per se, it's just only rock and roll I'm sending🙂 --I did read the Terms of Service/Privacy tab because I'm a weirdo and I read those everywhere I go. Filed for sure.

alfisya

Try this FFmpeg Commander, it creates ffmpeg command for you with your need.

brent

alfisya I will try this and check the quality/size later. I have heard ffmpeg had these capabilities, thank you

Axios

alfisya Way out site didnt know that animal existed.
Was just reading up on fffmpeg when you posted that.
Thanks

brent

alfisya it's interesting. In the output of my tries the Commander uses handbrake as an encoder. Finding the sweet spot between quality/MB right now in Commander's settings but they are all increasing the 50MB source file size...maybe the COmmander's Presets are not where I should be shrinking the m4v?
Will keep playing.

ReillyBrogan

You can share individual files in GDrive and make them completely public to anyone with the link. Then just send the link to them.

alfisya

Axios There is also GUI for FFmpeg for encoding/decoding(?) in the repo called winff. It's very old, there is a setting for blackberry device. More recent one I found is videomass available as appimage.

Axios

alfisya Ya I got winff on other machine never used it much just didnt do it for me.

Axios

alfisya I remember videomass now after I downloaded it
I could never get the appimage to work on my installs

sangheeta

Use Youtube if you have an account, excellent video converter.
Upload your video, keep it private etc, then download it from youtube studio.
I did this several time, a 720p 350Mb video can finish 30Mb still 720p on your computer in mp4 format.

murbert

"I'll be happy to put it on your thumb drive when you bring it to me"

brent

murbert "It's been a couple weeks. Do you still have my thumb drive?"

murbert

brent This is why you put it on their thumb drive